Nitwits and Oddmints

I awoke with a start, sitting stark upright in the bed. It was the third time that night.

Something had to be done.

The boy must be stopped.

I trudged off to the coffee pot. It was five-thirty, which meant no one would be going back to sleep any time soon. My son clasped unceremoniously under my arm in what is now well-known as the sack-of-potatoes hold, the coffee, boy, and I hobbled off to the computer.

I allowed him to bang busily away at the keyboard while I jammed a great, big Mommy finger in his unsuspecting mouth. Gums for days! Would it never end? No other child I’d heard of had ever had this much trouble teething for this long—over a year of chewing, drooling, and fussing with no end in sight.

“Oh, well,” I told the boy. “Thirty more minutes and we should be able to get a hold of Uncle Sarah at the office.”

The boy grinned soggily at the mention of his diminutive, mystical, and oddly-named aunt. She often had a treat or at least a funny little bit of magic for him.

Magic.

If only teeth came in like magic! That’d be the ticket!

Of course, I’d learned by now that magic showed up in the darnedest of places.

*****

“I need to discuss this teething thing.” I suspected that I sounded desperate.

“And what, precisely, would I know about teething?” Typical. Really, she was awfully mundane for a psychic.

“I don’t know, but the whole situation doesn’t seem quite right. He’s over a year old, and not a tooth in sight, despite all the drooling and chewing! It’s like there’s something I can’t see that’s stopping them from coming through.”

I heard her shift in her big leather chair. I thought I’d detected a perking with interest. Apparently I’d said the right thing.

“Something stopping them....Hmm....I’ll have to research it.”

“Ah! Research! Want us to bring you lunch?”

“Thanks, but I’ve got some croutons, lima beans, and gerbil kidneys that I brought from home. I’ll have those at my desk around nine-thirty or so.”

*****

Uncle Sarah sighed the greatest of sighs. “I really wish there were some way I could bill for this.”

“That bad, huh?” I asked.

“Definitely a doozy, as non-legal matters go,” she affirmed. “At first, it seemed the likely culprit was a curse.”

“A curse?!” Octaves. I was gaining octaves. This was not what optimally sane people do. “who would curse such a happy, sweet little boy?”

“A jealous grandmother, obviously. One typically sees this sort of thing only on the pageant circuit, and of course he hasn’t had any contact with that bunch. That really only leaves nitwits.”

“Nitwits.”

“Yes.”

“And what, pray tell, are nitwits?”

“Invisible little creatures that thrive on infantile pain and annoyance. Fortunately, treating them is fairly straightforward. It’s testing for them that he’ll hate.”

“Can’t be much worse than where we’re at now.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”

*****

One look around me told everything I needed to know about where the quality of my day was headed.

“I don’t know what you’re up to, but he’s going to hate this.”

“Yes, I thought he might,” muttered Sarah distractedly from behind a rather sizable stack of papers and a cage.

We were at the edge of a field of tall grass. At Uncle Sarah’s feet sat what I could only have described as an Angora piglet. Long, shaggy fluff sprouted from every available inch of the busy little creature. I could see the boy craning his neck to get a better look at the situation from his carseat.

“What’s the pig for?” I asked, attempting to control the level of apprehension that threatened to creep into my voice.

“Hemingsworth is a sporffler, not a pig. He is a highly trained nitwit tracker, and it took a great deal of paperwork and bargaining to borrow him from the firm.”

“He’s very cute.”

“Yes, quite,” begrudged the tiny lawyer as she leafed through what must have been Hemingsworth’s operating manual.

“So, um, how does he work, exactly?”

“He has to chase the subject through the grass, subdue him, and inspect his oral cavity.”

Fun.

“The boy won’t get in all that grass! You know how poorly he handles the great outdoors!” Octaves again. This is no good. Calmness. Control. “Why the grass, anyway?” I managed to choke out.

“Hemingsworth demands certain working conditions. He won’t lift a hoof if he’s not on nice, springy grass.”

“And the tackling?”

“That seems to be more of a question of enthusiasm. Hemingsworth brings a lot of passion to what he does. Anyway, we’d better get things going.”

Up I hoisted the giant baby from his carseat. Thirty pounds of toddler writhed and struggled to get down onto the dirt around the edge of the field. Snuffle. His body went rigid as he sat up straight to locate the source of the noise. Squeel. He began his attempts to scale me to escape the charming animal below. Crunch. He froze again as his urban little brain registered that I was standing in the thick of long grass as far as his chubby legs could’ve hoped to carry him.

As I began to plunge him into the dreaded vegetation he resumed his efforts to climb his traitorous mother. Down he went as he threw out his limbs and arched his spine trying to bend backwards away from the green jungle below. I dropped him the last quarter inch to his feet and sprang backwards desperately, falling spectacularly in the grass and dirt myself.

Even broccoli could not have hoped to elicit more disgust from a child. Curled lip, wrinkled nose, and furrowed brow telegraphed every thought in the boy’s head, clearly letting me know I’d hit a new low in parenting. We locked eyes a split second before his aunt launched Hemingsworth, and that’s when I knew for sure that it was a very good thing he couldn’t manage a telephone for himself.

The sporffler tore through the grass like it was wet toilet paper. The boy’s eyes grew to the size of half-dollars as he struggled to react to this new, fluffy reality. It was much too late though. Hemingsworth sprang mightily from the grass and toppled the toddler gleefully, snuffling his mouth with an eagerness that bordered on indecency.

“How will we know—?” I started to ask.

“Shh!” hissed the expert.

And then Hemingsworth snortled three almighty sneezes right in the boy’s face. Clearly, this was the limit, and the piercing wails and shrieks shattered what little peace remained to the afternoon.

“Definitely nitwits,” noted Uncle Sarah, as she blew a brief but complicated little tune into a golden kazoo. “The treatment is simple. Two of these at bedtime, and he should have a full mouth of teeth in the morning.”

“What are they?” I inquired as I took the strongly scented little bundle from her.

“Oddmints. They taste great. You should have no problem getting them down him.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Couldn’t we have just given him the oddmints in the first place?”

As she hoisted the now-smiling child over her head, she replied, “Oh, definitely. But this was much more fun, don’t you think?